A Nick Lowe song, “I Love My Label” somehow sparked me into action with a line about how his label often asks for tracks that are 2:50 or shorter. I don’t have any worries like that as I am enjoying life without a label decently enough. But the idea of being concise got under my skin.
Without any plan, simply following a muse, has led to 8 songs. They’ve taken on a bit of a somber lyrical content so I’ve lovingly dubbed the whole affair Short Songs For Long Faces. It’s still a work in progress but it would take a lot of songs to fill out a whole album. EP’s never held much sway with me….until now. Perhaps there are some song collections that don’t really need the weight of 40 + minutes. It’s been a journey of the artistic sort, no label to please. Funnily enough the track lengths are averaging a label friendly 2:20, give or take a few seconds.
As a sidebar allow me to mention that I’m enjoying Ben Franklin’s autobiography – a freebie that’s on iBooks (lots of high literature to be found there at no cost). Anyhow, BF apparently didn’t hold much stock in artistic tangents, saying that flowing the muses never leads to a raising of one’s condition. Hmmm. Still mulling that one over.
Sidebar 2: this is my first post composed on the wordpreess app for iPhone. We’ll all get to see how that works out.